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Since its debut in 1982, the Worldwide Soccer Manager series - and its predecessor, Championship Manager - has been the last word in football management simulations. It's a proper British success story, too, begun by the Collier brothers in their respective bedrooms and growing to a hulking global franchise.

Gameplay in the latest version, Worldwide Soccer Manager 2008, is much the same as it always. For the uninitiated, it's a stunningly realistic simulation of, well, being a Worldwide Soccer Manager. Choose a club, pick the team, and the handle tactics, transfers and the tantrums of your star players. All of this is modelled in an environment composed of dozens of countries, hundreds of professional leagues, thousands of teams and hundreds of thousands of players.

It is also remarkably accurate. Developer Sports Interactive rely on an army - literally - of volunteer 'scouts' who collect information about every aspect of the teams, leagues and countries they're responsible for: who plays for which team, who the coaches are, how many fans the stadium will hold and much more. Same said volunteers are also responsible for collecting and collating the famous statistics - literally millions of them - that contribute to how good, or bad, your players are. It's a tremendously exhaustive exercise but one that results in a world crammed full of detail, with the minutiae of every club recorded.

It's also updated upon release for the season in question. And the fantastic community - referred to collectively as 'the scene' - release legions of updates to the game's database, normally after every transfer window, to ensure that the game is kept up to date.

Gameplay is infectious and absorbing. It's a soap opera that's played out in every newspaper in Britain every day, but leading your favourite team to glory adds an undoubted level of gloss and involvement. As well as the staggering number of players, staff, teams and leagues, the game itself is incredibly detailed, allowing training schedules, tactics, financial budgets and a huge amount more to be managed in order to keep your club on an even keel.

Part of the attraction is the realistic AI. Clubs, players and staff all seem to have unique personalities and are often scarily realistic at modelling the real world which they mimic. Teams will even learn about your tactics as time goes on in order to better fight against them on the pitch.

Graphically, the Worldwide Soccer Manager games have never been much to look at, often compared to an Excel spreadsheet, but that's not the main attraction of the game. Fancy graphics and million of polygons would ruin what have become a cult and an art form.

The only real concession to graphics is the match day engine, which is now further separated from the regular game than the past. The game is represented using text commentary, as it always has, but now it's possible to watch the action in a 2D, top-down view. It's basic - players are represented as coloured, numbered dots - but harkens back to many player's youth and furious games of Subbuteo. The movements are well programmed and when combined with the relentless imagination of the football fan can provide a stunningly absorbing portrayal of the game.

Despite the fantastic and solid foundation that Worldwide Soccer Manager is built upon, the 2008 version hasn't seen a huge raft of improvements and updates aside from the inevitable data updates. Additions are mostly minor but do include a new advisor system, improved match system and revamped finance system.

If you're a newcomer to the series, then this perhaps isn't the best place to start - earlier games are certainly less complex and daunting. This is best bought, then, by the legions of ferocious fans that are addicted to the yearly incarnation of the game, craving the (admittedly small) updates to both game and data that make sure they're not missing out on any transfers. It's the same old brilliant Worldwide Soccer Manager, then, but one for devoted fans only - more of a slight evolution than a revolution.